This invention relates to sanitary waste disposal and in particular to a portable sanitary waste receiving device ideally suitable for use with dogs and cats.
Many people today keep dogs as pets. These animals are easily trained to relieve themselves at one or two specific times during the day. The owner of the pet usually walks the animal in the street and allows the animal to pass his waste products to the ground. In many areas the law requires the dog owner to clean up the waste.
There are a variety of devices in the prior art for picking up animal droppings. Such devices have heretofore had various shortcomings. The device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,446,525 has an elongated handle and a pair of open frame members at its lower and which are adapted to hold a disposable film bag, with the bag opening downwardly. The device may be then placed over a body or pile of animal droppings and operated to move the frame members toward one another so as to enclose the animal droppings between portions of the film bag. Such a device, though effective for a single body of droppings, is not satisfactory for sequentially picking up more than one body of droppings. As the device is opened for a second load, the intial load will tend to fall out. The result is that progressively larger multiple bodies of such droppings would have to be picked up by the device at each subsequent operation or, alternately, the device would have to be unloaded by removing the disposable bag after each pickup and substituting a new bag for the next pickup. Also well known in the art are separate receptacle and pusher which are each individually mounted on handles and manually operated by the user to push the animal droppings into the receptacle for transportation. Such devices involve two separate parts and therefore two-handed operation. They also involve the problems of continually cleaning the contaminated utensils.
The device of U.S. Pat. No. 3,757,737 is a mechanical pickup device for animal droppings which is remotely operable from the upper end of an elongated handle and which has pickup means at the lower end of the handle capable of sequentially propelling a series of bodies of animal droppings from the ground into a disposable bag carried by the device.
This type of device in the prior art is not generally satisfactory because it permits the waste to come into contact with the ground and generally is not capable of picking up small pieces of soft waste.
The device of the present invention contemplates a waste receiving device for animal droppings which is remotely operable from the upper end of an elongated handle member that has one end connected to a receptacle member that has side and bottom walls and a lid member. The lid member is pivotably mounted on the receptacle member at a side wall area of the latter and is controllable by means of lid actuating means that are located at the handle member.
The lid actuating means includes mechanical linkage that has one end connected to the lid member and a second end spaced from the receptacle member and terminating near the free or second end of the handle member. The second end of the linkage is free and is accessible to the user, the second end being maneuverable by the user to open or close the lid by means of the linking system. The present device permits the waste to be deposited directly into the receptacle member, thus alleviating the above shortcomings.